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We've Won! Kellogg College Community Engagement and Impact Awards 2019

1 March 2019 / 0 Comments
News

Get History, a website designed to bring interesting, up-to-date, and accessible history to students and adults alike, has won a Community Engagement and Impact Award from Kellogg College, Oxford.

The annual Community Engagement and Impact Award rewards Kellogg College 'students who have demonstrated a genuine commitment to community engagement, increasing impact, promoting knowledge exchange, or widening participation.'

The college writes that the 'website brings history and historical research to as wide an audience as possible. Initially started as a study aid for secondary-school students, it has expanded to include the wider public, introducing current historiographical debate in a fun and accessible manner. As well as topic-based articles, which encourage the audience to develop their own opinions and undertake further practical and book-based research, it has increased the impact of other historians’ work, by including interviews and competitions. Quizzes, facts, and ‘on this day’ bring the bizarre and wonderful side of history to life, inspiring engagement with history, and showing its importance in the world today.'

Get History was established in 2014 as a reaction against the 'dumbing down' of history for children. Its guiding principle is that history doesn't have to be boring or oversimplified; it just has to be well-expressed. Complex historical ideas, concepts, and debates can and should be brought to life, because understanding history helps us to understand who we are now and why we are here: it is the story of us. This principle is carried through the site in articles, reviews, interviews with leading historians, quizzes, facts, and quotations.

Debbie Kilroy, the site's founder, writer, and editor, has said: 'It is an immense honour to receive this award and to be recognised for the hard work involved in running the site. I think Get History has so much potential, and has so much to contribute to historical study; it's nice that others - and particularly an Oxford college - think so too!'

You can find out more about the Kellogg College Community Engagement and Impact Award here.

Author Info

Debbie Kilroy

Having read history at the University of Birmingham as an undergraduate, where I won the Kenrick Prize, I worked as a trouble-shooter in the public sector until I took a career break in 2009. Thereafter, I was able to pursue my love of history and turn it into a career, founding Get History in 2014 with the aim of bringing accessible yet high quality history-telling and debate to a wide audience. Since then, I have completed a Masters in Historical Studies at the University of Oxford, from which I received a distinction and the Kellogg College Community Engagement and Impact Award. As well as continuing to write for and expand Get History, I am now a freelance writer and historian. I have worked with Histories of the Unexpected and Inside History, and my article for Parliaments, Estates and Representation won the ICHRPI Emile Lousse essay prize (2019).

Fact of the Day

In the mid-twelfth century more courtiers died from drowning than fighting for their king.

Quote of the Day

"I see that you have made three spelling mistakes "
~ Thomas de Mahy, Marquis de Favras's last words on being handed a copy of his order of execution, 1790

On This Day

1564 William Shakespeare was baptised in Stratford-upon-Avon. His actual birthday is unknown.
1865 John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln, was shot and killed by a US Cavalry soldier in Virginia.
1933 The Gestapo, the secret police of Nazi Germany, was founded.
1937 At the request of the Spanish nationalist government, Nazi and Italian Fascist air forces deliberately targeted civilians in an aerial bombing of the Basque town Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.
1945 Marshal Henri Petain, First World War hero and head of France's Vichy government during the Second World War, was arrested on charges of treason by the Allies. At trial he was found guilty and sentenced to death (although the sentence was never carried out).
1986 Thirty-one people died in the world’s worst nuclear disaster to date at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Kiev. The longer-term effects and deaths are still not known.
1999 TV presenter Jill Dando was murdered outside her home in Fulham. The crime is still unsolved.
2002 Robert Steinhäuser, a student expelled from the Gutenberg Gymnasium (school) in Erfurt shot and killed thirteen members of staff, two students, and one police officer, before turning the gun on himself.
2016 The jury at the Hillsborough inquests decided that the 96 Liverpool fans who died during the 1989 FA Cup Semi Final had been unlawfully killed.